New version of Lout now available for sneak preview

[Jeffrey H Kingston]

Greetings to everyone on the Lout mailing list.

A new version of Lout, Version 3.09, is now available in my ftp
directory, ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/lout/jeff, for sneak preview.
If you are looking for a long-lived, stable version, you should wait
a few weeks until this version is tested by the more adventurous,
and I release the resulting follow-up version.

The main new thing this time around is a completely new and much
improved diagram drawing symbol, @Diag, which replaces @Fig.  @Fig
is still there for backward compatibility, but it is obsolete now.
Here is the full list of changes:

    Bug fixes
    French hyphenation
    foll_or_prec works in all cases now, not just galleys (for expert users)
    @Enclose symbol (for expert users)
    Multi-page figures and tables can be boxed (revised @Format option)
    Optimal paragraph breaker has been tuned to discourage widow words,
      and to hyphenate more paragraphs but use fewer hyphens when it does
    More consistent set of setup files since all now derived from one master
    Setup files "doc" and "report" now work with plain text output
    Unpaginated (continuous) plain text output
    @FirstChapterNumber, @FirstSectionNumber etc. options in setup file
    Alternative error message format (filename:linenum:colnum: ...)
    Newline no longer needed at end of file
    New diagram drawing package called Diag (replaces Fig):
      many new link types; trees; labelled nodes and links; many useful options
    New "oragged" paragraph breaking style, combines ragged and outdent
    Comprehensive usage message printed by "lout -u"
    Horizontal spacing of subscripts in equations improved

Incidentally, I had to turn off optimal page breaking to get the User's
Guide to converge this time.  The reason was cycling of the optimal page
breaker caused by a footnote in just the wrong spot.  So, it can happen
if you are unlucky, as I was.  When I get some time I will revise the
document to get that footnote away from the page break.

I will be away and not answering email for the next five days; I am taking
a well deserved short holiday.  As always, keep those comments, bug reports,
and requests for new features rolling in.

Jeff Kingston
address@hidden (until December)
address@hidden (still works fine, is being forwarded automatically)